Investor's Corner
Tesla Motors’ Residential Battery Pack, Lean on Details
Energy storage and Tesla Motors’ residential battery pack has been trending over the last couple of days since it was announced last week during the company’s conference call. In typical Musk fashion, the conference call reference was lean on details and provides the carrot for financial analysts to overlook it’s miss on revenue and earnings.

Tesla battery technology integrated into SolarCity residential solar system. (Image credit: Solar City)
The assumption is this battery pack production will be able to store energy from your solar panels and electric vehicle owners will be able to use that electricity to directly charge their cars.
This is an interesting play from Musk and direction for Tesla Motors due to the fact that residential battery storage doesn’t exist at this point—some pilots have been underway in California via Tesla. Some critics are saying Tesla may be getting sidetracked and would benefit from a more pragmatic CEO (think they said the same thing about Steve Jobs in early 80s).
They have a point. I write for a manufacturing software magazine, called Automation World, and this audience seems to be ideal market for battery storage, if the return on investment is right. However, while researching an upcoming feature article on energy management for manufacturers, plant floor production is just starting to focus on managing energy for bottom-line savings. Battery storage isn’t in the picture, yet—though commercial buildings might be easier to implement than manufacturers at the beginning.
So is Musk’s aim correct? Is residential battery storage ready?
Battery to power your home from @TeslaMotors – very appealing after going 6 days without power after Hurricane Sandy. http://t.co/QyIWRG8pfL
— Freyja Balmer (@bettyrocker) February 12, 2015
One critic, Jigar Shah, president and co-founder, Generate Capital, believes the solar and battery storage market's first push would be for commercial buildings or manufacturers, but not necessarily with residential.
On a recent Energy Gang podcast, Shah says,"You have to have a market for residential storage, by which to bid that capacity into the market like intelligent generation does and get paid for it. So if you decide to have 24 hours (or longer) of battery storage, then it’s not a dead asset sitting there that only gets used twice a year.
Again, Shah is talking about a lithium battery battery pack linked with solar. So what is the vision from Musk and JB Straubel?
From the conference call comments, Tesla said the design is finished. Musk says,
"We’re going to unveil some of the Tesla home battery consumer battery that will be for you using and people’s houses or businesses, fairly soon. We have the design done and it should start going into production probably about six months or so.”
So not much at this point and Musk once had hoped to leverage "used battery packs" as part of a greener energy storage solution for businesses or homes.
However, Tesla’s director of powertrain business development, Mateo Jaramillo, on the same podcast, says,“So will a used EV battery in seven or eight years be cheaper, more cost-effective to integrate into whatever application you’re trying to get into than a brand new battery in that year, says Jarmamillo. “Right now, the answer doesn’t look like to be yes.”
RELATED: [Podcast] Tesla’s Battery Storage Strategy
BMW is also starting a battery storage pilot program in California with Pacific, Gas and Electric, which we announced last month —Tesla and BMW Battery Packs to the Rescue?). Tesla has also said they are in talks with utilities and they are not enemies in this market play.
So there’s something here and it seems like Musk is porting over his Model S plan: create a market, create buzz and hope supporting market mechanisms will sprout up.
Jigar Shah makes a good point that utilities need to have real-time analytics and a communication infrastructure to provide energy pricing signals quickly to customers. Shah sees this support needed to help residential storage to make money and even “pool” their energy with other battery systems and sell it back to the grid.
Just like last year with the gigafactory, Tesla has teased a product with to the clean energy and business crowd. The wait won't be as long as the gigafactory in 2014, Musk said via the conference call last week that "a product unveiling is probably in the next month or two.”
We're ready PT Barnum/Nikola Tesla.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk gives his most telling Tesla-SpaceX merger conversation yet
Elon Musk hinted a Tesla-SpaceX merger could be coming, and Wall Street is taking notice.
Elon Musk gave his clearest signal yet that Tesla and SpaceX could eventually combine, telling the All-In Summit in Los Angeles that the two companies’ deepening collaboration makes the question worth asking. Sawyer Merritt first surfaced the highlight on X Tuesday.
Asked directly why Tesla and SpaceX remain separate given how closely they already work together, Musk told hosts at the summit: “Great question there. With all this collaboration, on so many levels, who can imagine what action one might take when there’s so much close collaboration in so many areas.” SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell, who joined Musk on stage, added that SpaceX personnel have already moved into xAI to fill leadership and engineering gaps, saying the businesses are integrating “faster than I thought,” though “not fully integrated yet,”
The comments landed on top of merger speculation that has been building on Wall Street for months. JPMorgan has called a tie-up “strategically coherent on paper,” pointing to overlapping ambitions in AI, robotics, energy, transportation and space. Jefferies went further, estimating Musk could retain roughly 55.3 percent voting control in a deal structured without a premium, a scenario that would still leave room for Tesla shareholders to come out ahead. On Kalshi, traders now put the odds of a merger before 2028 at 66 percent.
Tesla’s stake in SpaceX, still under one percent, traces back to its earlier investment in xAI, which converted to SpaceX equity after SpaceX absorbed the AI company. The two are also jointly building Terafab, a chip facility in Austin meant to serve both Tesla’s AI computing needs and SpaceX’s satellite ambitions. Wedbush analyst Dan Ives has stood by a 2027 merger timeline for months, and Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest recently floated a similar case, an idea Musk pushed back on directly at the time.
Another Tesla SpaceX merger prediction by ARK Invest has Elon Musk talking
The timing adds another layer. Tesla has scheduled an October 1 unveiling for its next generation Roadster at a venue near SpaceX’s McGregor, Texas test site, using the phrase “Go for launch” in its promotional material. Both stocks dipped roughly 2 percent Monday before recovering slightly in premarket trading Tuesday, with SpaceX shares up about 0.4 percent and Tesla essentially flat.
Musk stopped short of confirming anything is in motion. But unlike his past denials of a corporate restructuring, this response didn’t rule one out, and it came with Shotwell sitting next to him describing an integration that’s already underway.
Elon Musk
Tesla Cybercabs narrowly miss deadly Amazon cargo plane crash
An Amazon cargo plane crash near Miami’s airport stopped feet from dozens of Tesla Cybercabs.
An Amazon Prime Air Boeing 767 cargo jet overran the runway at Miami International Airport on Sunday afternoon, killing five people and injuring five more. The jet, operated by North Carolina based carrier 21 Air as Flight 7598, touched down around 2 p.m. after arriving from San Juan, Puerto Rico, then crossed the airport perimeter, plowed across NW 67th Avenue and struck multiple vehicles before catching fire, according to the Associated Press.
Photos and video from the scene show the aircraft’s nose stopped within meters of a fenced staging lot holding dozens of gold painted Tesla Cybercabs, the steering wheel free robotaxi Tesla began putting on public roads in Austin last week. Miami-Dade Fire Rescue has confirmed the plane struck “multiple vehicles” but has not said whether any Cybercabs were among them, and neither Tesla nor airport officials have addressed the fleet directly.
The Cybercabs had not yet entered commercial service in Miami. Tesla’s existing Robotaxi operation there runs on modified Model Y vehicles and has been unsupervised since Ashok Elluswamy confirmed the detail on X in July.
Footage of the plane crash from earlier today | #ONLYinDADE pic.twitter.com/iGoOtnd6cD
— ONLY in DADE (@ONLYinDADE) September 6, 2026
Elon Musk offered the briefest of reactions. Replying to a Zero Hedge post about the Cybercabs sitting so close to the wreckage, he wrote a single word: “Weird.” He has not commented further, and Tesla has not issued a statement.
The timing puts Tesla’s newest vehicle near an unrelated but highly visible tragedy just days after its Austin debut, a launch that had already drawn scrutiny from federal regulators. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened an audit how Tesla certified the Cybercab as compliant with federal vehicle safety standards, a process Teslarati covered after the vehicle’s September 3 launch event. That inquiry concerns the car’s lack of a steering wheel and pedals, not the Miami crash.
Investigators from the FAA and NTSB are focused on the plane, not the parking lot beside it. Flight data reviewed by outlets including Simple Flying show the 767 touched down around 170 knots, well above the 135 to 140 knot range typical for the aircraft, though investigators have not determined a cause. Amazon said it is working with authorities and that its priority is the safety of everyone affected.
Whether any Cybercabs were damaged, and what Tesla plans for the fleet parked near one of the country’s busiest airports, remain open questions.
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Tesla Cybercab is coming to Asia this month as US service officially begins
Tesla Asia says Cybercab will be on display in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Beijing and Shanghai this month.
Tesla’s Cybercab is heading to Asia. The official Tesla Asia account posted on X Thursday, inviting Cybercab fans to “Come experience the future of autonomy in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Beijing & Shanghai.” The post went up within hours of Tesla’s own Cybercab milestone in Texas, where the company said Thursday it had begun offering rides in across Austin.
Exact dates and venues for the Asia tour haven’t been released yet, though Tesla Hong Kong replied to the announcement with “Cybercab will be on display in Hong Kong soon,” while Tesla Japan’s response pointed fans to a sign up page for updates. Neither post mentions test rides or a service area, and nothing so far suggests Tesla is launching Robotaxi operations in any of the four cities. Based on how Tesla has run past Cybercab tours, in Europe in late 2024 and at US shopping centers that same December, the Asia stops are almost certainly static displays at Tesla stores or public venues as a means to stimulate buzz for its future driverless ride-hailing service in the big cities.
Cybercab will be on display in Asia this month!
Come experience the future of autonomy in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Beijing & Shanghai. pic.twitter.com/wGmmEastfX— Tesla Asia (@Tesla_Asia) September 4, 2026
The timing lines up with Tesla’s only prior Cybercab appearance in the region, a booth at the China International Import Expo in Shanghai last November, which Teslarati covered at the time. At that event, Tesla’s regional general manager for Shanghai framed the car as evidence of the company’s broader mission, a message Tesla has since formalized in its Master Plan Part IV, which states that “autonomous vehicles have the capacity to dramatically improve the affordability, availability and safety of transportation while reducing pollution, particularly in our increasingly dense global cities.” The same document is where Tesla lays out its “sustainable abundance” framing for Cybercab and Optimus alike, describing the two as the hardware behind an AI driven push to cut the cost of transportation and labor at scale.
Whether Cybercab actually operates as a robotaxi anywhere in Asia remains an open question, considering China has already pushed an autonomous ride-hailing market that’s run on homegrown players like Baidu’s Apollo Go and Pony AI. For now, the four city tour reads as a marketing push timed to Austin’s momentum.
